


cold in the summer

by arghmuffin



Series: Zutara February Flash Fics [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Inspired by Hades and Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Non-Linear Narrative, Slight fluff?, Zutara February Flash Fics, because it’s fun and i have no sense of connection, man idk if this qualifies as fluff lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:07:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29189049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arghmuffin/pseuds/arghmuffin
Summary: The flowers bloom, and Katara misses Zuko.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Zutara February Flash Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2148075
Comments: 4
Kudos: 45
Collections: Zutara February Flash Fics





	cold in the summer

**Author's Note:**

> Day 2: To Resist, Hades/Persephone AU but some things are slightly different.
> 
> I don’t know what this is and I lowkey got carried away afkajsdkf. Also this is late I’m crying and I’m sorry if some of it sounds weird because I didn’t go through it super thoroughly. Regardless, I hope you enjoy!
> 
> also thanks dee :)

/

Spring is in full blossom and the fields are full, a visible abundance of colorful dots scattered haphazardly within the grass. 

Katara trails her fingertips on a nearby fire lily, her fingers barely ghosting over the stem. She watches as the closed bud bursts open in a flurry of petals, beautiful and fragrant, reverent in its elegance; fire lilies have always been her favorite.

“Do you have to do that to every flower we pass?” 

Katara whips around and scowls at her brother, who is suddenly lazing in the bed of moss a few yards away from her.

“If I can help them bloom faster, then I will,” she answers defensively, and he chuckles. A warm breeze comes through as he pushes air out of his mouth, ruffling her hair and tangling her flower crown.

“Sokka!” she cries out in annoyance, but he vanishes with the wind, leaving behind nothing but the echo of a bigger laugh.

Frowning, she pulls the messy crown off from her head, running her fingers over the knotted spots. They pull apart instantly, rearranging themselves into perfect condition. She pats her curls down and readjusts it, sighing as it encircles her head once more. 

It’s moments like these that make her heart ache from the empty spot beside her, the missing fingers running through her hair and gently weaving in the flower crown. 

Longingly, Katara kneels down to the dirt, hands splayed on the earth. A sudden burst of daisies appears between her fingers, small and bright, but she ignores them. 

Sunshine is warming the ground beneath her hands. She wonders if the core of the earth can feel her heartbeat, racing down to her fingertips. If it misses her the same way she misses it.

/

Cerberus, Katara decides, is less scary than his owner.

He’s a sweet dog, really. The way he rolls over to get his belly scratched makes her giggle in surprise, her fingers still rubbing his fur. The nymphs had made him sound like a giant beast, a great force to be reckoned with, but Katara only sees an oversized, playful pet.

His owner is less amused. Zuko’s mouth hangs open in disbelief, his warning hand still stuck in the air. Somewhere in the distance, she can hear a fury cackle.

“How did you… he’s never—”

“Maybe he just likes me more,” Katara states bluntly, her tone suddenly cold. He drops his hand, shoulders slumping. She pretends not to notice.

“Oh, right,” he says, a little dejectedly. She seethes in silent anger, still petting Cerberus, but his drooling tongue makes her lips curve up a little.

It’s been a few days, she thinks, since she’s seen the sun. Or maybe it’s been longer. Maybe time moves differently down here, and she’s been gone for decades, or maybe even a century or two. The sudden thought makes her panic slightly, but she tries to keep her composure. The only sign of worry she can see is her hand shaking slightly, still submerged in brown fur.

Zuko lets out a quiet sigh and turns around.

“I'll leave you to it,” he tells her, which she ignores, especially the tone in his voice. He vanishes, probably to somewhere far away, she's still not sure. But he’s gone, so she hits the ground hard in anger. The dirt immediately bursts into asphodels, mournful in its bone-white. It’s the only flower she sees here, and she hates it. She hates everything in the Underworld, how dull it always is, how melancholy it seems.

Cerberus gives her questioning eyes as she stands up, sudden and fast. She leans away from the dirt in experimentation, and the asphodels wilt slightly as she moves away further and further. Something that never happens. Never should happen, she thinks furiously. 

So Katara makes a promise right then and there; she will never, ever forgive Zuko for taking her away from the land of the living, _her_ land, her home. 

A soul, perhaps from the fields of asphodel or Tartarus, gives out a sudden moan of despair. She cries for the first time, loss mixed into her fear, ashy hyacinths sprouting from the dirt where her tears land.

/

Grass tickles the soles of her feet, gentle in their admonishments. She laughs in surprise and turns around, facing the swaying green.

“There’s no need to worry,” she reassures it, but the waving doesn’t cease. She sighs; her mother is as protective over her as ever, for reasons she still has not fathomed. “The nymphs are sleeping a few caves away. Nothing could possibly happen.”

But still, they grasp at her ankles the best they can, deceivingly docile for the warning they are trying to convey. Katara pulls her feet away, growing slightly annoyed at their insistence.

“I promise you—”

The earth is sudden in its disturbance, the only perceivable sign of danger a deep cracking in the ground before she is tugged away, pulled into the dark abyss that lurks below. There are no objects to bruise her skin, no pain she can feel when her eyes flutter close. 

_I’m sorry,_ someone says in her dreams, before she wakes up in a nightmare.

/

Katara never eats in the Underworld. She doesn’t need to.

Well, she almost does, once, on an exploratory stroll in the garden. The glistening, blood-red apple is halfway in her mouth before Zuko appears, his face panicked, hands raised in warning.

She doesn’t go to the gardens after that.

/

“I think Cerberus is mourning your presence already," comes a voice behind her. 

Katara doesn’t flinch at his sudden arrival, just smiles. A small one.

“Of course he does. He should.”

His laugh is quiet and rare. She wouldn’t admit it, but she likes it; getting him to laugh is like coaxing open a particularly stubborn Venus flytrap. They were never her forte, but she always loved the challenge.

“Your mother, she… she asked me for you today,” he tells her. The fields of asphodel are visible below them, but she actually finds the wandering souls to be quite interesting, so she doesn't mind. 

Zuko's sitting perilously close, only a few inches away. Her attempts to still her heartbeat work much faster than expected; it comes to an immediate, screeching stop in her chest.

“She did?” she asks calmly, but her thoughts churn violently on the inside. Of course, Kya would beg for her return. Katara knew, intimately, of her protective and at times overbearing nature. She could only imagine what it was like in the world above, void of her mother's bountiful harvest, barren as she searched for her lost daughter. 

“Yes.” His voice goes quiet, “I know you want to leave, and you—”

“No.” 

His eyes widened in surprise. Her heart is back to thumping hard in her chest, reverberating in her ears so loudly she’s surprised an asphodel doesn’t grow behind it.

“... No?”

“I want to stay,” Katara says, and smiles.

/

She misses the sun. She misses her friends, the tiny stone goddess Toph, the Zephyr Aang. And her family, and the nymphs, and the way colorful flowers used to bloom under her hand. She misses a lot of things.

(Zuko had tried to bring her flowers once, from the living world. The sheepish smile he wore when they came, already dead in his hand, made her laugh unexpectedly.)

She plays fetch with Cerberus sometimes. Zuko had watched stubbornly on the side before she convinced him to join in, the volume of their laughs making the Furys roll their eyes. She could imagine Toph, roaring in amusement when Cerberus accidentally knocked Zuko over, and Aang, spinning around him on an airball. The thought had made her heart ache, a laugh still stuck in her throat.

Katara shouldn’t be thinking about this, his pale, smooth hands and the way his lips curve when he smiles. She shouldn’t be thinking about his quiet laugh and the scrunched, disgruntled face he makes when Cerberus licks him. But she laughs, unabashedly loud and free, anyways.

She’s falling in love with the Underworld, with him, and she’s scared of the thought that it’s slowly getting easier to admit it.

/

The pomegranate seeds sit tantalizingly in her hand, a deep, entrancing ruby that she probably stares too long into.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Zuko asks her cautiously, and she can almost pretend that she doesn’t sense the slight hopefulness behind it.

Katara licks her lips nervously. She can hear something like Kya’s voice in her head, shrieking at her furiously not to do it, not to doom herself to half a life of misery.

She shouldn’t have fallen in love with him. She knows that, just as much as she knows that she does. And she tried to resist, she really did, but in the end, she’s never wanted to do what her mother, the world, expected of her.

The hesitant smile he gives her is breaking. She’s at the bottom of the earth, and how much farther can she fall, anyways?

Katara swallows the seeds, and the next breath she takes is almost freeing.

/


End file.
